HI. My name is Athena Jezik. We’re here for our next little series of videos today.

Today we are going to do a little bit more work in explaining cranial sacral therapy, so I have a skull with me so this can be a little bit more clear to you.

This work is so subtle that it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on when my hands are on the head so I’m going to use this colorful skull in order to help to explain things.

The cranial work as we followed in an earlier video has to do with the cranial bones themselves.

We’ve gone over that and we may go over it a little more today, but primarily what I wanted to show today is the part of cranial work that deals with getting the small bones inside of the mouth corrected which helps sometimes with severe headaches, a lot of things with dental work that is done, temporomandibular function, having a difficult time with maybe suckling if they are infants, maybe swallowing, different things like that involve different bones in the body, or bones inside of the skull that are tiny to lock down and create a bit of a problem, and those bones cant always be released from the cranium.

So with that, that’s what we’re going to be doing.

I do want to explain one more thing. The most important bone is the sphenoid bone, which is this yellow bone here that you can see from the inside. It covers all of the other bones in some capacity; it’s in touch with all of them. That bone comes onto the base of the skull. It looks like this taken away. It’s the red and the blue bone, where they’re together here. The natural motion of this is working with the cranial system. It’s like a little pump here. It moves forward and backward.

Now if this particular bone gets off in any way, shape or form, sideways or anything like that, particularly sideways, that’s when our teeth don’t hit square. Because the bone is sitting sideways the jaw is going to be out of place.

Basically the work today is going to be in balancing the jaw, balancing the mouth and opening up some of those bones in the nasal area and the hard palate of the mouth.

OK, to start with, for mouth work we use a glove. It’s better to use non-latex and non-powder. The flavored ones only create more activation of the saliva glands so I don’t recommend using flavored ones.

So what we’re going to do first is go inside of the mouth on the biting surfaces of the teeth right here. We’re going to be looking for the rhythm which is going to be an expansion and a bringing back. That’s the way the mouth moves, it moves up and down at that suture moving out and in, the hard palate on top moving out and in. OK.

SO by doing that with a person you have them drop their chin, you go in on the biting surfaces, then you wait for that rhythm, that expansion, and, so it’s a flexion and extension and it’s in the rhythm with the sphenoid bone.

There’s a couple of different directions that you take it to check to see how the range of motion is at the sphenobasular junction, and you can get a pretty good feel as to how the balance of the body is.

The sphenobasular junction is this joint here where the blue and yellow meet tight there. That’s an important joint.

The next one is you go underneath on the outside of the cheeks or outside of the teeth. You’re outside of the cheek and pulling outward. That’s going to give some expansion between the maxilla and the zygomatic arch, the zygoma, and it’s going to give some expansion there and help to open up a little bit of the nasal bones. Anything else that’s small and inside of the nose and mouth area.

SO by that we just bring the chin down and go underneath the cheek and then pull it open this direction and then the same thing on the other side underneath the cheek, and giving a, kind of hooking your finger in there under that arch and then slowly and gently without very much pressure just expand it outward and there we pull our finger out.

Next we are going to be inside of the mouth on the hard palate back where the palatine is, which is these three bones that come together back here. The finger’s going to go, it’s going to be an outward forward backward and inward movement.

By doing that you do the same thing. You drop back, put your finger in and expanding outward and downward upward, and I’m going quite rapidly for the purpose of demonstration. Sometimes I will wait on the bone five to ten minutes for it to move.

If if is then traumatized or it’s in a compressed situation, if people have false teeth or bite plates, be sure that they know it may not fit the same afterwards because the shape of the mouth does change.

And then we do a little more on the mouth. We go along the suture which is in the middle of the mouth, and we’re going to be right at the edge of the soft palate and hard palate, and that is going to be affecting what is called the vomer which is the nasal bone that is deep inside here. You can kind of see it from there, but that will correct the nasal bone. When you have infants that cannont suckle it’s because the vomer is out of place, and that’s the first thing a cranial person should check if there’s an infant who has a difficult time suckling.

Swallowing, the same thing. And there you just give the vomer a little side to side. There’s about three grams of pressure.

Sometimes the bones will move just with an energetic distance from it, where there’s actually space between your finger and the bone and you can still feel it move. Pretty awesome.

This goes into a torqued direction as well, just to make sure that the range of motion is all really good.

And then the last one is we’re going to go back in and we’re going to check the balance of it again so that’s on the biting surfaces and the rhythm is good and she’s had, even though we didn’t do it for too long, she had a number of changes that did happen in her mouth.

So that is how we do basic mouth work in cranial sacral therapy.

Athena Jezik is a licensed massage therapist who specializes in Lymphatic Drainage and Cranio-Sacral Therapy.